June 16, 2008 6:06PM

The 500 Year Flood: Something Doesn’t Add Up

By FOXBusiness.com

They’re calling this a 500 year flood. I also covered the 1993 Mississippi flooding, which was also called the 500 year flood.

My understanding of a 500 year flood is that it comes once every 500 years. Not sure who is doing the arithmetic but something does not compute. I talked to the mayor of Muscatine, Iowa, Dick O’Briden, about this today as I stood hip deep in floodwater in downtown Muscatine and he agrees that something is off.

Muscatine is just south of the Quad Cities, right on the Mississippi River. Both river barges and train lines pass through town and right now there is no action on either. Barge traffic has been shut since last week with the locks running wide open because of the increased flow. Several loaded barges are visible from the shore…stranded when the water got too high. Dick O”Brien was born and raised in Muscatine but left for about 40 years to work for GM and BMW. He tells me he moved back to retire and play golf but ended up getting elected mayor 13 years ago. “Not a lucky year,” I suggested.
O’Brien says when he sees pictures of Cedar Rapids and Iowa City he thinks Muscatine IS lucky.
Business History

One of the highlights of covering floods on the river towns is drinking in (pardon pun) their history…and they all have a rich business history. Frank Kelly runs an organization called the Downtown Action Alliance aimed at revitalizing Muscatine’s downtown. He tells me Muscatine was once dubbed the “Pearl Button Capital of the World,” thanks to fresh water clam beds nearby in the river. Weber and Sons Button Company was in 1915 the world’s foremost producer of fancy pearl buttons and the company exists in town to this day. It is not threatened by the floodwaters, though the town’s two biggest businesses are.

Office Furniture Capital

If you’ve sat in office chairs over the years chances are pretty good one was made by HNI Corp. The fortune 1000 company is the maker of HON office furniture and several other brands. It is the world’s second largest office furniture maker. HNI trades under that symbol on the NYSE. Muscatine constructs temporary concrete and steel levees to protect HNI’s riverfront complex. So far it’s holding and the plant that makes oak laminate for office desks is humming along oblivious to the water 50 feet from its doors.

The other big employer in town is Muscatine Food Corporation. A smaller version of Archer Daniels Midland, Muscatine Food processes literally millions of bushels of corn into sweetners, animal feed and various other food products. The levee protecting its operations (unlike the one at HNI) is made of earth. I talked to some locals today who say there is a lot of water bubbling up on the wrong side of that levee. The longer water stays up on an earthen berm, the more saturated it gets and the more likely it will give way. Right now the Mississippi isn’t supposed to crest here until at least Tuesday. The crests will come much later downriver. That means several more days of high water on levees up and down the Mississippi that may not be able to hold.

Maybe this is a 1000-year flood.

-Jeff Flock